Romantic medicine is part of the broader movement known as Romanticism, most predominant in the period 1800–1840, and involved both the cultural (humanities) and natural sciences, not to mention efforts to better understand man within a spiritual context ('spiritual science'). Romanticism in medicine was an integral part of Romanticism in science. Richard Sha of American University wrote in Romanticism on the Net:
Romantic writers were far better read in medicine than we tend to remember: Byron consulted popular health manuals by Adair and Solomon; Coleridge read deeply in his physician, James Gillman's, library; Percy Shelley ordered Spallanzani's complete works and immersed himself in the vitalist controversy, while Mary Shelley read Gall and Spurzheim; Blake engraved plates for medical literature published by Joseph Johnson; and Keats, of course, was trained as a physician.
The impetus for Romantic ideas in medicine came from Great Britain, and more specifically Scotland – John Hunter (1728–93) – and the idea of life as a principle not reducible to material constructs, and John Brown (1735–88), founder of the Brunonian system of medicine (see also, Romanticism in Scotland#Science). The nexus for Romantic Medicine was Germany, largely nurtured and guided by German natural scientific inquiries regarding the vital aspects of nature, such as that of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and his influential ideas regarding a life principle (Bildungstrieb), a formative drive (nisus formatives) as well as a philosophical tradition that emphasized the dynamic aspects of man and nature, and their essential relationship as part of a unity – German idealism and Naturphilosophie – all guided by Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) challenge calling for critical inquiry as the basis for science.
The essence of romantic medicine was to overcome the deep crisis that Western medicine found itself in during the latter half of the 1700s by means of a science of life (pathology and physiology grounded in history) that went beyond the simple application of the method of the inertial sciences (physics and chemistry, grounded in mathematics) that had worked so well for inert nature, but was found wanting when applied to vital nature, but also a science of life that went beyond the idea of medicine as a subjective art largely to be left to individual practice. The Zeitgeist of Romantic medicine sought to unite the uneasy partnership of material natural science and subjective clinical practice to create a true scientific foundation for Western medicine (see also Romanticism and epistemology)
The question of life The issue of life – what is life? – or the scientific inquiry and quest (questio) regarding vital nature was one that increasingly drew the attention of philosophers and scientists in the 1700s, following the great advances concerning the laws and principles of inert nature - the Copernican, Galilean and Newtonian revolutions in celestial and earthly mechanics - astronomy and physics. With great confidence and optimism, philosophy and science turned to the mystery of life, or rather, that of health - how to restore and maintain it. Those most immediately drawn to this field were those who had some concern with health issues, physicians in particular. Thus, a natural alliance formed between natural philosophy and science on the one hand and medicine on the other. What they had in common was to advance the discipline of the study of living functions or physiology.
Irritability Because of the influence of the inertial sciences and the success of the method used to gain knowledge of the laws and principles applying to inert nature, the initial approach was to apply the same method to vital nature. What emerged from this was the extensive study in the first part of the 1700s of ‘irritability’, this being based on the central nervous system and involving physical forces such as electricity and magnetism. However, the mechanico-material explanation was not fruitful when it came to actually dealing with life in the case of healthcare practitioners. Albrecht Von Haller's (1708–77) 'irritability' hypothesis and its failure adequately to explain the phenomenon of life, as well as the waning capacity of the Western mentality to participate living nature that lay at the root of the Hippocratic system of humours (or noetic capacities), led to a split between those who clung to the ancient tradition, but in name only (becoming routinists or empiricists), and those, largely in the universities, who sought a (material-mechanical) scientific basis regarding life and medicine. This split led to a widely acknowledged crisis in Western ‘medicine’ in the latter half of the 1700s.
That medicine c. 1800 was caught in the throes of a foundational crisis is testified to by numerous sources and above all by the documented collective striving of all leading European countries to totally reform medicine. No later than the 1780s – as the sources clearly show – were the leading doctors aware of the critical situation.
Romantic medicine and dynamics The attempt on the part of philosophers and scientists to come to grips with the question of life led to an emphasis away from mechanics or statics, to dynamics. Life was action, living movement, a manifestation of an underlying polarity in nature and the universe. Instead of seeing nature from a ‘one-eyed, color blind’ spectator perspective, what was needed was a perspective that was binocular and participative. Inertial science had advanced in man's understanding of inert nature, her outer form or shell, what Francis Bacon termed natura naturata (outer form or appearance). However, it was not capable of going beyond this to a more dynamic discernment or apperception of the living inner content of nature, the domain of life – life in general, not just life biological as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the philosophic core of the scientific effort to penetrate to natura naturans, put it, asking further “what is not life?” based on the understanding of life as a dynamic polarity between powers, forces and energies. As one observer wrote "Die eigentliche Lebenslehre der Romantik aber war: Polarität." But as he promptly adds: "Sie klingt uns überall entgegen, nicht nur in der Naturphilosophie."
The foundations
Bacon's Novum Organum The groundwork for this intensive search to understand life was laid down by Francis Bacon, who sought to sweep clean the Augean stables of late medieval Scholasticism, with its increasingly obtuse and confused attempts to approach natura naturans (nature becoming or 'naturing') using the old Greek noetic capacity, already long lost to the Western mind and having gone underground into the arts, but also the nominalist straying into abstractions and refractions in their study of natura naturata via secondary phenomena as in Newton's study of color (cf. Goethe's Farbenlehre or Study of Color). Neither the Realists nor the Nominalists of late medieval scholasticism could handle the task before them, and Bacon sought, at the start of the Age of Science, to provide a method to approach nature's outer form rationally, but by means of a conscious use of man's higher faculty in the form of the ‘forethoughtful inquiry’ (‘lux siccum’), that is, an inquiry that brought a particular idea, itself evinced through the mind and the domain of true philosophy, namely, the "mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking" (Coleridge's Biographia Literaria), or epistemology. The Baconian approach was further developed by C.S. Peirce who made a distinction between induction and abduction: the latter being the method of discovering hypotheses, the former that of testing them.
Coleridge and the role of philosophy Bacon's work provided what Coleridge termed ‘method’ – the derivation of laws or ideas to guide the mind (mens) in its observation of nature, out of which emerges understanding (concepts) and principles (reason). It is also the task of philosophy, as Coleridge emphasized, to "settle the nomenclature," as the key to science is terminology where one term is not synonymous with something else, as is the case in demotic language, but instead the term discloses its meaning and increases understanding and knowledge. This was further developed by Heidegger and phenomenology (such as with the term Veranlassung).
Greek philosophy (love of wisdom or sophia) later emerged as philology (love of the Logos) to interpret philosophical works. It is this penetration of nature using both the eductive (as opposed to the projective) arts (innate wisdom) and (Logos-backed) sciences to achieve a rational, conscious understanding of nature, both outer form and inner essence that those who became part of the Romantic movement in England and Germany in particular, were seeking. It is not surprising that Romanticism, a scientific endeavor and quest, involved the cultural sciences or humanities (epistemology, philology, literature, poetry, arts, etc.), as well as the natural sciences.
Search for method for vital nature Romanticism rejected the application of the method that had worked so well for inert nature to the realm of living nature, or life biological. While living organisms contained a degree of a mineral, material nature amenable to being approached via the laws of material physics and chemistry, life itself could not thereby be satisfactorily explained. On the one side, the material scientists sought a solution in reducing the non-material or metaphysical to ‘just’ a manifestation of the material, essentially thereby ignoring that this did not at all account for life. On the other side, a part of the ‘Old School’, drawing from the Hippocratic humoral theory (involving non-mechanical, etheric concepts), sought to emphasize the non-physical or vital aspect of nature, which somehow existed above and outside of nature and directed its activities. The Romantic scientists and philosophers rejected both reductionist mechano-materialism (material natural science) and conflationist mystical-idealism (vitalism).
Locke, Fichte and German Idealism Romanticism also involved a fundamental understanding of functional polarities as the basis for and essence of life as Idea, Law and Principle. One of these polarities in cultural history involved the seminal influence of the English genius and the germinal or gestational genius of German-language culture. Coleridge mentions this in his Essays on Method, and the theme is explored in D.E. Faulkner-Jones' The English Spirit.
The seminal ideas came from Francis Bacon regarding scientific method and from John Locke regarding the ideas of self-consciousness and mind. Locke set up a relationship between mind (subject) and outer world (object) wherein the mind is set in motion by objects producing sensations but also has an internal activity of its own (reflection) that acts on the sensations to create perception and conceptions. For Locke, the activity of mind is paramount, as for Bacon, and it is only through the activity of mind (consciousness) that the outer world can be ‘realized’ as causative and as actual. Identity for Locke lay in the capacity for the ‘I’ (consciousness) to unite disparate ‘deeds’ or actions of nature (as cognized by the mind), into a meaningful unity. For Locke, identity of self exists in nothing other than participation in life (the etheric) by means of fluctuating particles of matter rendered meaningful and real by acts of the mind and consciousness. The Romantics, as Locke, refused to accept the view that life is a product of “the chance whirlings of unproductive particles” (Coleridge).